Radical has a negative connotation to it nowadays, but it’s not radical to want equal rights, believe that my tax money should ensure me at the very least, clean air, water, access to healthy food, adequate housing, and a bridge that won’t collapse while I’m on it. Not one working or retired person should starve knowing that they pay taxes or have paid taxes at some point. Unhoused people shouldn’t even be a thing because for our country to be so “great,” everyone should have a house. America has lost the plot.

It’s not radical to teach kids about slavery in our country because it’s a part of America’s history. We have to tell the good and the bad parts. There’s no reason my school spent years on American History, and I got half of a semester of African American History. That half of the semester wasn’t even adequate because my mother had to teach me that Black People were more than traffic lights, peanut butter, and “I Have a Dream.” It’s not radical to accuse America of talking about equality but not believing in it, because to this day, I’ll never forget the story my mother told me on her first day starting a new high school that had integrated all of the poor communities into the Churchill School District, and protesters had signs of disdain in the 80s. If my mom went through the “you’ll never get a job with your hair like that” insults, I have no idea what hell my grandmother faced.

Teaching kids empathy isn’t radical. It’s raising great human beings to not grow up and make the same mistakes as the people before them did.

Knowing that slaves built the White House and many of America’s treasures isn’t radical. It’s facts. The US Capitol Building, The White House, and even the original Wall that Wall Street is named after were built from free labor. I had to learn these kinds of things on my own. When the slaves were freed, the government gave the slave owners money for the loss of property ($300 per slave). It’s not radical for African Americans to want reparations, as America wrote checks to every other demographic that they wronged without policing what they did with their money.

It’s not radical to walk the streets and protest. It’s not even progressive if it’s not organized. People on the streets shouting for change screams powerless when there are more people than there is power. The 381-day protest against segregated seating on city buses in Alabama that took place in 1955, now that was power, and that solidified change. Showing up for one day to scream and speak, of course, you’re going to get people who think the same. That is indeed an echo chamber. Echo chambers don’t grow change. In America, to have all the tools in 2025 to organize but to only come up with peaceful protesting is disheartening, not radical, and won’t elicit change, as the villains of this current story, this current regime, don’t care about our protests as they already have all of our hard-earned tax-paying money. It has to be systematic. It has to be something organized in mass to create change that requires inconveniencing oneself, and there’s nothing that an American hates worse than inconvenience.

Radical thinking changes the world. – Rob Peace